Category Archives: everyday life

I have just survived a week of the latest cultural phenomenon – Pokémon Go. It started innocently enough – with a US iTunes account and a couple of free hours on a Monday evening. Since I wanted to meet a few more players, I decided to create an event for the following Friday. Something simple – let’s meet at the Congress Square in Ljubljana to mingle. It exploded almost immediately. On the first day, 300 people indicated on Facebook that they would come. By the end of the week, this number rose to 750 with 2000+ interested.

Lesson 1: Facebook is still a great viral machine

Organising events is a lot like a horror movie. You never go alone into the woods. In this case Alja Isakovic co-hosted the event and provided the much-needed sanity check. As a consequence, we had a Facebook Event that looked official (correct style of announcement, good graphics, sane venue and time). But most importantly, it was about something that everyone was hearing about, but was still hard to get in Slovenia. With the basics in place, we just had to share it to our personal Facebook networks. This exposed the event to enough people that we got noticed by existing Facebook Pokémon Go communities. A couple of cross-promotion partnerships later, we 10x our reach. More importantly, we reached the right people – early Pokémon Go adopters.

Lesson 2: Journalists like a positive, feel-good story

Within a few hours of creating the event, we also got contacted by journalists. In my experience, once the first journalist gets in touch, others soon follow. Alja and I cleared our schedule for the next day and started explaining the game. The aspect that I liked the most is that we didn’t focus on the actual game content too much. We rather talked about the social and urban aspects of it. As it stands right now, the game itself is a pure antithesis of modern society. It encourages you to go out and explore the world around you, mingling with other players, and working together on the same goals. This explained the context for the global interest and makes it easier for journalists to explain it to the general audience. At some point, Alja also suggested that we need better titles. It was a light, summer-time story, so picking Pokémon trainer made complete sense. It’s just silly enough that it brings smile to people’s faces. It will also give me an opportunity to measure its reach and how long people will remember it.

Lesson 3: Letting it go

Pokémon Go is big at the moment and it’s going to have a huge following for months and years ahead. But high level of required engagement and battery drain on phones will be deal breakers for the general public. This will reduce the audience to the younger generation that will actually play the game. Discuss all the stats, trade Pokémon (once thats available) and battle each other. This will be a community of interest that needs enthusiastic leaders that will help them teach and organise follow-up events. I’m happy that many of them them came to the event in person and I’m sure they’ll figure out how to collaborate.

Conclusions

Facebook on its own is enough to get you traction, but you still need traditional media to get legitimacy and wider reach.

When 750 people on Facebook say they are going, 20% of that number will actually come (~150), as seen in our case. Still a huge success, just don’t plan your food budget based on that.

Just relax and go with the flow. Not everything has to have an immediate business value or a long term goal.

My current reading list nicely shows the professional interests I am currently persuading. A mix of social media and community engagement (Trust Agents and Tribes), Web Analytic so I can get better insights into web pages, The Four steps to the Epiphany since it’s always good read about product and business creation process and Laws of Simplicity that my brother was kind enough to shared with me to not lose the touch with the design philosophy.

Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.

As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.

So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.

This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.

I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.

So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.

So apparently there is a new brand of Laško beer – Eliksir, a stronger beer that is normally known as bock. There are advertisements everywhere, urging you to skip your traditional cup of mulled wine and go for the “winter beer”.

The mystical bottle of Eliksir

So why #fail?

It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to find, so hard that we are yet to find a place in Ljubljana that actually heard of it and none actually have it in stock. We’ve tried a number of pizza places and bars around old Ljubljana city center and we failed. We did get lots of Guinness and other dark beers.

Reading their promo material it states that it’s available in supermarkets and in selected pubs. That’s perfectly fine, but you’re doing a good job of hiding a list of places where it’s actually available.

So Laško, if you’re actually spending this much money trying to convince me to try your new beer, make sure that I can actually buy it.

Avatar is one of those movies that you see in cinema in 3D and all you have to say is – wow. Stunning effects, rich and beautiful (although a bit color crazy) scenery and a story that works for most for the movie. It’s very much worth the hassle of going to the movies.

The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but maybe it will help you see it. (yes, I’m that psyched about it)